The Recognitions (Dalkey Archive edition) (10 page)

Wyatt was twelve, and deeply impressed by the funeral sermon his father spoke over that anonymous box where Aunt May, in a lavender gown she had never before worn, lay with the lid closed, a stipulation as importunate as that of the Blessed Umiliana (another devotee of quicklime) having her socks put on, with her last breath, so that the crowd could not venerate her nude feet.

—“O man, consider thyself! Here thou standest in the earnest perpetual strife of good and evil,” Reverend Gwyon thundered the lines of William Law down upon the gray faces (whose owners, years later when he was locked up, defenseless, recalled it as the last truly Christian sermon he had ever read). —“All nature is continually at work to bring forth the great redemption; the whole creation is travailing in pain and laborious working to be delivered from the vanity of time; and wilt thou be asleep? Everything thou hearest or seest says nothing, shows nothing to thee but what either eternal light or eternal darkness has brought forth; for as day and night divide the whole of our time, so heaven and hell divide all our thoughts, words, and actions. Stir which way thou wilt, do or design what thou wilt, thou must be an agent with the one or the other. Thou canst not stand still, because thou livest in the perpetual workings of temporal and eternal nature; if thou workest not with the good, the evil that is in nature carries thee along with it. Thou hast the height and depth of eternity in thee and therefore, be doing what thou wilt, either in the closet, the field, the shop or the church, thou art sowing that which grows and must be reaped in eternity.”

Three years later, that partisan Deity whose most recent attention to the family had been Aunt May’s rescue from mortality, acted in Wyatt’s direction (though, as the boy and his father independently suspected, perhaps it was a different God altogether). Wyatt was taken with a fever which burned him down to seventy-nine pounds. In this refined state he was exhibited to medical students in the amphitheater of a highly endowed hospital. They found it a very interesting case, and said so. In fact they said very little else. Physicians, technicians, and internes X-rayed the boy from every possible angle, injected his arms with a new disease they believed they could cure, took blood by the bottleful from one arm to investigate, and poured the blood of six other people into the other. They collected about his bed and pounded him, tapped his chest, thrust with furious hands for his liver, pumped his stomach with a lead-weighted
tube, kneaded his groin, palped his spleen, and recorded the defiant beats of his heart with electric machinery.

He was embarrassed by the flocks of fingers exploring for cancer, or something as satisfactory, and mortified when photographed in despoiled nudity by a handsome nurse. The hands of these young women were the first ever to reach him with the succor of indifferent love; and two he would never forget, though he never saw her to whom they belonged. He lay in an operating room staring at the lamp above him, reading the circle of words in its center,
Carl Zeiss, Jena, Carl Zeiss Jena Carl Zeiss
 . . . while a surgeon’s insistently clumsy fingers dug in an incision under his arm for a node which slipped from their grasp. The hands of the nurse at his head wiped his face with a damp cloth, and when he fainted were there with aromatic spirits to revive him: so the woman’s hands kept him, and the man’s eventually caught the node, took it out, sewed up that hole and descended to make another in the leg where they paused on the surface to slice off a piece of mottled skin, then entered to probe and remove a fragment of muscle. A zealous young interne, Doctor Fell, ran a needle into his backbone and tapped that precious fluid. Week after week, he continued to provide an outlet for this conspiracy of unconscionable talents and insatiable curiosity.

Reverend Gwyon took all this in a dim view. As his son lay dying of a disease about which the doctors obviously knew nothing, injecting him with another plague simply because they had it on familiar terms could only be the achievement of a highly calculated level of insanity. Wyatt’s arms swelled at each point of injection. The doctors nodded, in conclave, indicating that science had foreseen, even planned, this distraction. From among them came Doctor Fell with a scalpel in his hand and a gleam in his eye seldom permitted at large in civilized society, a gleam which the Reverend recalled having seen in the eye of a Plains Indian medicine man, whose patient regarded it respectfully as part of the professional equipment assembled to kill him. With the bravura of a young buck in an initiation ceremony, he slashed the arms open at each point of infection. Dr. Fell did a good job. They drained for two months.

Winter thawed into sodden spring, cruel April and depraved May reared and fell behind, and the doctors realized that this subject was nearing exhaustion, might, in fact, betray them by escaping to the dissection table. A few among them bravely submitted, in the interests of science, new experiments and removals; but during Wyatt’s prolonged residence many comparatively healthy people had been admitted to the hospital, and were waiting
in understandable impatience to make their own vital contributions to the march of science. With serious regret, the. doctors drew their sport to a close, by agreeing on a name for it:
erythema grave
. After this crowning accomplishment they completed the ritual by shaking hands, exchanging words of professional magic, mutual congratulation and reciprocal respect, and sent the boy home to die.

In the parsonage, Wyatt lay perspiring freely in his sheets. At one moment his muscles and the joints of his body were so filled with pain that he would deliberate for minutes before moving a limb, or turning over. At other times he was feverishly awake, and the books stacked round him could not hold his exhausted attention. Their titles ran from Doughty’s
Travels in Arabia Deserta
to
A Coptic Treatise Contained in the Codex Brucianus
, the
Rosarium Philosophorum
, two books of Dante’s
Divine Comedy
, Wyer’s
De Prœstigiis Dœmonum
, Llorente’s
Inquisition d’Espagne
, the pages of these and all the rest littered in the margins with notations in Reverend Gwyon’s hand. Gwyon had brought them up, one by one, meaning them to serve for conversation, which he found difficult; but once arrived in the sickroom he would stand passing the book nervously from one hand to the other until asked about it. He would look down, as though surprised to find it in his hands, a moment later be talking about it with a fervor which gradually became agitation, until he left off altogether and handed it over, as shy at the idea of trying to press on his son things which so interested him, as he was excited at the possibility of sharing them with him. Then he might simply stand, trying to keep one hand still in the other behind him, while he stared at the floor, in the acute embarrassment of this intimacy which the sickness had created between them. On the other hand, Wyatt read as much as he could, to prepare for these conversations which gave his father such pleasure, to break the silences whose strain showed so readily in that flushed face, and the short exhalations tainted with the sweet freshness of caraway. Sometimes Gwyon simply turned and rushed out of the room, with as much restraint as he could manage until he reached the door, as he did one day when he espied a stained familiar pamphlet among his son’s papers on the floor. —Where did this come from! he demanded snatching it up open on a picture of a wreathed papal monogram tied at the foot with an anchor. —I found it, in the rubbish, on the rubbish heap, Wyatt faltered, —the kitchen midden years ago, behind the carriage barn. He stared at the covetous look on his father’s face. —I didn’t know . . . —And you’ve kept it, yes, all this time, kept it for me? Gwyon brought out without looking up from it, turning the spotted pages. —Did
you read it? —Just, the Italian was difficult, I didn’t know all the words, but the pictures . . . that? that monogram, with the anchor? —Yes, Gwyon murmured catching it under his thumb, —Clement’s monogram, he was martyred, yes here, gettato a mare con un’ancora . . . they tied an anchor to his neck and threw him into the Black Sea.

—Yes into the sea with an anchor? like the man you told me about? The anchor caught on a tombstone, and the man coming down the rope in the celestial sea to free it, and he drowned? Listen, . . . But Gwyon, fearing the insistent monotone that crept into the boy’s voice for the delirium it might forebode, hurried out of the room studying the picture of the subterranean sanctuary discovered beneath the basilica of Saint Clement of Rome, a sudden light in his eyes as though his senses were afloat with vapors from two thousand years before.

Gwyon’s entrances were often as precipitous as this escape; and there were times Wyatt pretended to be asleep when he heard his father’s approach upon the stairs.

When he could not read, he painted, with an extraordinary deftness which consumed his whole consciousness, and often left him so tense that he passed into delirium. —Listen, I . . . what was it? Listen . . .

It was the deliria that Gwyon feared, which left him doubly helpless, trying to conceal his anxiety behind his back in one hand twisting the other, and he hastened to call Janet who was, a good part of the time now, the only moving thing in the house. She remained, gibbering testimony to Aunt May’s inquisition.

So far as anyone knew, she never left the house. Her voice had gained the timbre of that of a grown man when she raised it in the full volume of speech. But this was infrequent. She usually spoke in a hoarse whisper, lubricated by a salivary flow which she had difficulty controlling (and caused, though she did not know it, by a medicine compounded of mercury which she’d found in Aunt May’s cabinet, renewed and taken reverently in uniform overdose since Aunt May’s death). Her shoulders were broad, thighs narrowed, and with squarely muscular hands she plied an emery cloth to remove the fine filaments which darkened her chin.

In any other native household, her regular absences from her work, or those occasions which found her insensibly rigid before an empty window, or prostrate on the kitchen floor, might have been taken for organic disorders; and, like the Venerable Orsola Benincasa, whose sixteenth-century childhood was visited by innumerable misinterpreted ecstasies, she might have been bruised black-and-blue, pricked with needles, and burned with exposed
flames to rouse her. But Reverend Gwyon remarked to himself that her derelictions from duty had occurred most notably during Easter week of that year: that about eight o’clock on Thursday evening, in the midst of serving his dinner, she was numbly entranced before the kitchen stove; and the following afternoon at three he almost upset her in the dark passage outside his study door, where she stood limbs immobilely extended before the cruzcon-espejos.

When modern devices fail, it is our nature to reach back among the cures of our fathers. If those fail, there were fathers before them. We can reach back for centuries. Gwyon appreciated the extended hands of his people less and less as the months passed. The doctors refused him information of any direct nature, guarding the frail secrets of their failing magic as carefully as Zuñi priests planting prayer sticks. And then there was that hallowed tribal agreement among them never to admit one another’s mistakes, which they called Ethics.

On the other, the spiritual, hand, the congregation breathed out stale prayers for the boy’s recovery. But in the end they always gave their God full leave to do as He wished, to remove the lad if such were His sacred whim, loading the fever-stricken boy with the guilt it had taken them generations to accumulate. They called this Humility.

The sermons thundered at them from the pulpit of their peaceful church increased in violence, and embraced expiatory petitions to the Lord their God less and less frequently. Still the gray faces continued to appear, drawn by duty and (though none but the Town Carpenter might have admitted it) a sort of perilous curiosity. The tension mounted, until the sermon on the evils of vivisection, on the morning of June twenty-fourth, after which the Reverend retired for the rest of the summer.

That Sunday morning, Saint John’s, or, as the Reverend reminded them in a deceptively peaceful voice, Midsummer Day, the simple altar was decorated with flowered sprigs of oak trees. The warm light of the sun stretched in long empty patterns from the diamond-shaped panes across the congregation. Someone’s liver-and-white hound appeared and tussled briefly with the bellrope, came part way down the aisle, and then sensing something turned and fled.

The sermon, meanwhile, had progressed from vivisection to the Mojave Indians, —among whom it is humbly understood, and I quote from foremost authority, “to be the nature of doctors to kill people in this way just as it is in the nature of hawks to kill little
birds for a living.” Among the Mojaves, it is believed that everyone dead under the doctor’s hand falls under his power in the next life. Superstition? It is what we, gathered here today in the sight of God, call superstition. We call such people as those benighted savages, and send missionaries among them, to enlighten them with the word of Truth we are gathered together to worship here today. For centuries, missionaries have brought back stories to make us blanch with horror, stories of human sacrifice practiced in the interests of religion on the bloodstained altars of the Aztecs. Yet we support in our very midst a highly respected class of men who are Aztecs in their own right. Like ourselves, they may throw up their hands at the thought of murdering a maiden on a stone altar. But it is only that this was done to serve a god different from their own, that shocks them. We may find them wringing their hands in reproach against those who roasted Saint Lawrence on a gridiron: Is it the roasting they regret? Is it the suffering of Saint Catherine on the wheel? The choking cries of Tyndale being strangled? The muffled words of forgiveness on the lips of John Huss at the stake . . . those of Our Lord on the Cross . . . O Sancta simplicitas! No! They regret simply that none of these experiments was carried out under the scientific conditions of a medical pathological laboratory. (He had already gone ten minutes beyond the time usually allotted to the sermon, but the gray faces were bound in wonder.) —Tell me, how did Asclepius end? he demanded, reaching his turning point. —Asclepius, the Greek god of medicine. Why, Zeus slew him with a thunderbolt! But we mortals, what are we allowed? Not even as little as John of Bohemia, who threw his surgeon into the river when he failed to cure the king’s blindness. No terms, like the Hungarian king five centuries ago, who could promise full reward to the surgeon who cured his arrow wound, with death if he failed. No, we turn them loose, with money in their pockets, and expressions of deep respect for their failures. The same trust, and confidence, perhaps, that Saint Cyril had for the physician who cut out his liver and ate it, . . . that Pope Innocent VIII had in the physician who prescribed the blood of three small children for His Holiness’ nerves, . . . of Cardinal Richelieu, on his deathbed, given horse dung in white wine . . . Have you noticed, he went on, lowering his voice, leaning toward them over the high pulpit, —the charm that doctors wear? A cross? No. In the very name of Heaven, no! It is a device called the caduceus. Look closely . . . two serpents coupling round a wand, the scepter of a pagan god, the scepter of Hermes. Hermes, the patron of eloquence and cunning, of trickery and theft, the very wand he carried when he conducted souls to Hell. (The organist, an alert young man, fingered
the pages of the next hymn and made sure there was air in the bellows.) And when Reverend Gwyon hit the pulpit with the flat of his hand and raised his voice from the crisp confidence he had just given to commence a new inventory of the achievements of the medical profession, beginning with —Who was it that suggested the use of the guillotine in the French Revolution, but a doctor who died under its own blade! . . . there was a cheer from the far end of the nave, a moment of unholy silence, and the organ lusted into
Rock of Ages
as the Town Carpenter left hurriedly from one end of the church (in the direction of the Depot Tavern), and Reverend Gwyon, shaking but steadily, left from the other.